A while back I noted the awful Langbehn-Pond case, where a dying woman’s partner was kept from her bedside by a Florida hospital; attempts to sue the hospital for discrimination eventually failed. The story is dreadful and the hospital’s conduct simply indefensible morally – as the judge pointed out in his summing-up:

the defendants’ lack of sensitivity and attention to Ms.Langbehn, Ms. Pond, and their children caused them needless distress during a time of vulnerability. The defendants’ failure to provide Ms. Langbehn and her children frequent updates on Ms. Pond’s status, to allow Ms. Langbehn and her children to visit Ms. Pond after emergency medical care ceased; to inform Ms. Langbehn that Ms. Pond had been transferred to the intensive care unit, and to provide Ms. Langbehn Ms. Pond’s medical records as she requested, exhibited a lack of compassion and was unbecoming of a renowned trauma center like Ryder. Unfortunately, no relief is available for these failures

The actual legal documents are rather chilling – the hospital successfully argued that their duty of care was entirely to the dying woman and not at all to her family, and cited precedents including the following:

In the Middle District of Florida a plaintiff brought a claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress against the United State Bureau of Prisons (“BOP”), to which the court applied Florida law. Gonzalez-Jimenez De Ruiz v. United States, 231 F. Supp.2d 1187 (M.D. Fla. 2002). Plaintiff’s father was being held in a Florida prison, and because of concerns for his father’s health, plaintiff traveled from Puerto Rico to Florida to visit his father. From April until June the prison officials refused to allow plaintiff to visit his father, told plaintiff that his father didn’t wish to see him, and told plaintiff that his father was “fine.” Since at least May, the father was actually in a nearby hospital being treated for terminal cancer. Plaintiff learned of this from a non-prison official and visited the hospital, where he also learned that his father’s spine and neck had been broken by prison personnel who “had crudely attempted to manipulate [his] spine.” The very next day, plaintiff’s father was transferred to a prison in Texas where he died nine days later, all without notification to his family. Thus, for over a month the plaintiff was denied contact with his dying father, was lied to and denied the most basic information about his father’s terminal condition and the condition caused by the BOP personnel, and was not given information about his father’s transfer to Texas and ultimate death. The court held that because the father was in a federal correctional facility the allegations were not “beyond the bounds of decency” or “utterly intolerable in a civilized community,” and dismissed the Complaint.

I would beg to disagree with the court on its definition of “decency” or a “civilised community”; and I hope that Jackson Memorial Hospital is suitably proud to be able to point to this precedent as justification for their behaviour.

Be that as it may, two days ago Janice Langbehn got a slightly unexpected phone call. It was from President Obama, apologising for the way the family had been treated, and informing her that he has directed that all hospitals in receipt of Medicaid or Medicare funds allow equal visitation rights. The family still has had no apology from the hospital, but I think that counts as a victory all the same.

• Shaw on Ulysses
  via Bookslut, George Bernard Shaw's take on Joyce: "I am an elderly Irish gentleman, and if you imagine that any Irishman, much less an elderly one, would pay 150 francs for such a book, you little know my countrymen."
  (tags: ireland literature)

I have my doubts about the UUP/Conservative narrative, but I have to admit they have been running a good campaign so far; their special election broadcast was rather good (compared to the SDLP’s which was awful). Now they’ve pulled a beautiful stunt on the DUP, which may not get many votes but does get my applause for its chutzpah.

The DUP launched this fairly sober poster a couple of days back:

Of course, the ‘voter’ in the picture is a photographic model whose images are available in a commercial archive. The UUP/Tories therefore used another picture of her for a poster of their own:

Glorious. (Perhaps a little too wordy and cluttered, but the basic point is there.)

(Hat-tip to Unionist blogger "Bobballs", via Slugger O’Toole)

I remain sceptical as to whether the voters of Northern Ireland actually care particularly about electing members of the main Westminster parties, but I admire the way the message is being delivered.

Though in the latest development, it seems that both parties may have breached terms of use for the photographs!

The highest capital cities in the world (eight at over 2000m):

Sucre (Bolivia) 2783m, though seat of govt is La Paz at 3660m
Quito (Ecuador) 2763m
Thimphu (Bhutan) 2736m
Bogota (Colombia) 2619m
Asmara (Eritrea) 2363m
Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) 2362m
Sana‘a (Yemen) 2253m
Mexico City (Mexico) 2216m

Data from here. There’s then quite a jump from Mexico City to the next highest, Kabul (1807m).

Having just arrived in Addis, I wondered what it was that was making me feel more tired than I expected, and also why the weather was rather cooler than I had expected for 9° north of the Equator. Now I know.

(Also I bet there is no really measurable difference in alitude between here and Asmara!)

I read the first in this series, the multiply award-winning Take Back Plenty four years ago, and am now at last catching up with the other two. Seasons of Plenty has the massive spaceship Plenty, commandeered by Tabitha Jute at the end of the previous book, setting off for (with any luck) Proxima Centauri, loaded with many inhabitants of different communities and factions, and also endowed with a certain life of its own. Not a lot actually happens – there is a feeling of setting the scene for the third book, while just travelling from A to B. It’s oddly reminiscent of A Hundred Years of Solitude, which I was reading at the same time, except that Plenty really is a closed social space (which Macondo is not). It’s difficult to imagine such an enterprise being quite as anarchic (or indeed diverse) as Greenland paints it, but if you can swallow that premise it is fun.

I had read this many year ago, but it popped up on one of my various reading lists last week. It’s about a small town called Macondo, founded in the middle of the jungle (though also confusingly near the Caribbean, and not far from the Pacific) and the people who live there, especially the Buendía family who dominate Macondo for several generations. Along with the everyday political fare of revolutions, war, execution of the losing side, etc, there are recurrent surges of magical realism, alchemy, peculiar family relations, children born with tails, and towards the end an unfortunate Belgian who gets sucked into it all.

There is tremendous scope and vision here, but it’s not for the faint-hearted. I imagine that Márquez’s dense prose sings rather better in the original Spanish; the Penguin translation doesn’t really sing for me. Also I was mostly reading it in short bursts on planes which probably didn’t help. But it is very enjoyable.

I would not have watched the first episode of Flashforward if it had not been nominated for the Hugo awards this year, and actually that would have been a shame. Literally the only thing I knew about it was that it was a TV series based on a novel by Robert. J. Sawyer, and frankly that was have been enough to put me off: I find Sawyer’s prose leaden, his politics twee, and his characterisation utterly flat.

But the first episode of Flashforward sets up an intriguing premise: the entirety of the human race suffers a blackout and sees the future of 29/30 April 2010 (ie two weeks from now). Our hero, played by Joe Fiennes, is an FBI agent in Los Angeles, who is charged (in the most Sawyeresque and least convincing scene of the episode) with the task of Making Sense Of It All. Sawyer’s novels often take as their theme a Humungous Event which affects the Whole Of Humanity (or at least Canada); this show takes the premise and actually makes it come alive, with the vividly realised effects of the event on real people (including California teenagers who rather implausibly wear plenty of underwear while making out).

I noted with pleasure two actors known from Stephen Moffatt’s previous shows – Alex Kingston as Fiennes’ character’s liaison in Scotland Yard, and Jack Davenport as his wife’s future lover and, it is hinted, the Villain Behind It All. I probably won’t watch the rest, but I do hope Davenport’s character turns out to be a supernatural baddie; it would be rather a career progression from This Life and Coupling.

I would not be at all astonished to learn that the rest of the series failed to build on the promise of the first episode, but this was a very good start. (Please feel free to add spoilers in comments – I doubt that I will get around to watching the rest of it any time soon.)

• elmyra: Why Content Is a Public Good
  Thoughtful economic analysis of it all
  (tags: copyright)

It’s subtle but there: the new Labour election spot begins with Sean Pertwee saying,

You know, my father always said, “Don’t give up.” “Show resolve,” he said. He was so right.

So literally the first person mentioned in the Labour Party’s first election broadcast of the 2010 campaign is the third Doctor Who. Pertwee junior speaks for most of the video, but is replaced at the 2:25 mark by none other than David Tennant (doing his native Scottish rather than Tenth Doctor Mockney). I know that some political leaders like to claim that God is on their side, but I don’t think I’ve ever before seen a political party imply that it has the endorsement of a Time Lord. (Or at least of two of the actors who played him.)

(Hat-tip to .)

In Global Post. You are very welcome to tea in my map-lined office (see page 2).

I note that two of the nominees for the 2009 Arthur C. Clarke Award are by graduates of Clare College, Cambridge. Marcel Theroux was a contemporary of mine – we both matriculated in 1986 and got our BAs in 1989. I didn’t know him particularly well, but I do remember moving into a house on Newnham Road just after graduation as he was moving out of it. I stayed on in Cambridge for another couple of years, as a CUSU sabbatical and then an M Phil student, and left in 1991, which was also the year that the intake of new students included one China Miéville (who I don’t think I have ever actually met).

They are not the only sf authors with a recent Clare College connection: I knew Rebecca Levene rather better than Marcel Theroux when we were students, though she was in the year below us. She is best known in fandom as the former editor of the New Adventures of Doctor Who but is also an author in her own right, and has glancingly referred to her past studies of anthropoliogy and social sciences in her pseudonyms ("Evan Pritchard" and "Carla Marks").

Peter Ackroyd is also an alumnus, but rather before our time. I see also that Nick Harkaway who had a nomination for last year’s BSFA Best Novel would be a contemporary of Miéville’s, and comics artist Sonny Liew appears to have been at Clare several years later.

I read The City & The City a couple of months ago; Far North is in the pile of books to read.

I’ve been faithfully following Willingham’s series of graphic novels about fairy-tale characters adapting to life in contemporary America, and the latest volume has been nominated for the Hugos this year so I was glad to pick it up in Belfast.

After the previous volume saw the end of the grand conflict between the Earth-based Fables and the evil empire which had dominated the story so far, The Dark Ages shows that problems may not be over as other ancient evils come to life, protective magic loses its cohesion, and some of the war wounded are still dying. The pieces are being put in place for future plot developments but there is of necessity noi resolution, so it’s a slightly disappointing story on its own merits. The volume also includes a dubious extra, “Return to the Jungle Book”, where Willingham (who has previously failed massively at Arabic culture) uncomfortably and unsuccessfully tackles India, or rather a parallel world that happens to look like India.

I saw somewhere (and now can’t find) a complaint that Fables Vol 12; The Dark Ages should not have been allowed on the Hugo nominations list as such, that the rules specify “a story or story arc” and that this volume contains “The Dark Ages”, “Return to the Jungle Book”, and a couple of other stories, which should have individually been eligible. If that is what the rules say, and I didn’t just dream it, then I feel their letter may be wrong and their spirit is being interpreted correctly – surely most people buy books, not story arcs? This is only the second year of the Hugo for Best Graphic Story and it is still finding its feet (Paul Cornell missed out on a nomination for Captain Britain last year through administrative error). (Edited to add: Thanks to and for pointing out ‘s posts on this here and here.)

• copperbadge: SAM’S EPIC THREE THINGS ABOUT DOCTOR WHO: LET’S TAKE IT FROM THE TOP!
  Back to the original First Season
  (tags: doctorwho)

From

The Deadly Assassin in the style of new Doctor Who
The Caves of Androzani in the style of new Doctor Who
Genesis of the Daleks in the style of new Doctor Who
The Dalek Master Plan in the style of new Doctor Who
The War Games in the style of new Doctor Who
The Daemons in the style of new Doctor Who

One or two of these would have been improvements… (Well, one, anyway.)

Since last episode was the Introducing Eleven story, this was the Introducing Amy story. It had good and less good aspects, with perhaps some of the weaknesses of Moffatt’s storytelling style showing.

The good first: Karen Gillan is excellent. Amy already feels more three-dimensional than many of her predecessors. She has a disarming combination of confidence and uncertainty. I cheered when she picked the lock with the hairpin; I want to know more about the wedding, as does she. It’s only two episodes in, but she is charming her way to the top of my favourite companions chart.

Moffatt does scary very well. The ‘orrible tentacles, the sinister two-faced creatures, the hooded brethren, the repeated memory wipes, the terrified children, the queen with her untroubled glasses of water, all made a brilliant set of images. The fact that it all turns out to be something of a misunderstanding could have made the whole thing flop, but was handled poignantly (as in The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances.

Liked also: Sophie Okonedo, Terence Hardiman, the child actors.

A great lead-in to next week’s episode as well, rather better than, say, the unseen time-space telegraph which summons the Fourth Doctor to a part of Sussex pretending to be Loch Ness.

The less good: Moffatt sometimes lays it on a bit thick. (Does anyone remember The Girl With Two Breasts?) The parallel between the fate of the Space Whale and the Doctor was a beautiful concept, but hammered home without subtlety.

There were also some significant plot holes, though perhaps I just wasn’t paying attention. I did not catch how the Doctor and Amy managed to clean themselves (and their clothes) so rapidly after their Jonah experience. I was also left a bit confused as to who had set up the machinery of repression, and how. The whale itself, and its tentacular sensory extensions, seem to be completely separated from the Demon Headmaster and the brethren, who themselves of course are allowing the queen to go her own, potentially dangerous, way. It didn’t quite hang together for me.

Also – and this is a peculiar point reinforced by having watched the episode in Belfast – the framing of the UK in the story is a bit problematic. The towers all seemed to bear the name of southern English counties – the remark about Scotland was ambiguous, no trace of Wales or Norn Iron. It will have played well enough in most of the mainland but jarred with me a bit (similarly the Ninth Doctor’s display of British patriotism marrs The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances) and I wonder if it will really help in the export market.

Still, the good outweighed the bad, even if it wasn’t quite up to the standard of The Eleventh Hour.

I’ve been back in Belfast for a reunion of those of us who (more or less) started in Rathmore Grammar School in 1978 and left in 1985, 25 years ago.

I think everyone there was aware that this event was an intense, weird and probably unrepeatable experience; we have all changed in the quarter-century since we turned 18, and of course so has Northern Ireland. Out of 150 or so in our year, around 120 showed up, all I think with a mixed sense of curiosity and apprehension. But it was strangely excellent.

In the run-up to the event I had a nagging worry that I might get trapped near the bar by someone who I didn’t know especially well and didn’t want to talk to (a generic someone – nobody particularly in mind) but in fact everyone seemed to feel the same pressure to mingle. Pretty much everyone was using the opportunity to talk to people they hadn’t seen in 25 years, rather than just hang out with those they still see regularly. Even so, I know that I left after four and a half hours wishing I had talked to more people. (I wimped out not long after midnight; I imagine it kept going for another hour or two.)

I was amazed by how well most of us had aged. (One or two must surely be keeping portraits of their older degenerate selves in the attic.) We men had in general aged less gracefully, I thought; hair loss and greying making us look distinguished if we are lucky. Though the Head Boy of our year still looks cherubic, if a little careworn. He, poor lad, was called on to make a speech late in the evening when most of us had been there for several hours. I don’t think any sound system could have helped his voice be heard against the background of two and a half decades of catchingup on gossip.

A couple of brave trailing spouses had come too, thrust into a social setting where nobody was very interested in talking to them. The cliche is of course that people use these occasions to hook up with old flames; I did enjoy chatting to those I had snogged back in the day, but nothing further was likely to happen – at least one of them had completely forgotten our brief encounter, and for something that seemed so important at the time I confess the details have mostly slipped my mind too.

There were some moments of sadness. The event which sparked the organisation of the reunion had been the death about a year ago of one of our classmates; and while most of us have now become parents, a lot of us have also lost parents, and others (such as the older sister who used to babysit for us, long ago). We are all of course in our early forties; speaking only for myself, I’ve had the worst health I can remember over the last year, with back problems in June, bad flu last month, my continuing dental hassles and the less drastic but psychologically significant experience of getting bifocals.

But for me this was a very affirming experience. Partly it was just that spending an evening with people who are all exactly my age, for the first time since the final school disco (held for some reason in a small club on Donegall Square, rather than the more usual Greenan Lodge Hotel), made me feel that 42 isn’t actually all that old. Partly also that I felt a sense of integrating my roots. I’ve moved further away from Belfast than most of my fellow pupils (one other attendee had come from Italy; a couple of no-shows are across the Atlantic), and my father is twenty years dead, my mother lives in Dublin, my sister in France and my brother in Massachusetts. But the years I had shared with the people I saw last night were an important part of making me who I have become, and it seemed right and appropriate, and slightly wonderful, to raise a glass or three to celebrate that.

Edited to add: A trailing spouse writes.

A few odd things happened over the last two days (which have been spent en route to and in my native city, for a school reunion which will be described in another post).

On the way to the airport, we ran into some congestion on the E40 – not itself an unusual occurrence; but then galloping along the hard shoulder towards us came a horse, trailing blue restraints and followed discreetly by a police car. The traffic jam continued for another couple of km, and then we found its cause: a jack-knifed and battered horse-box, with another horse standing calmly beside the road. At least I was able to say that evening that wild horses (well, a wild horse) couldn’t stop me coming to Belfast for the event.

I had booked into a B&B owned by a past teacher who was offering a discount rate for returnees like myself – I may well have been the only one who took advantage of the offer. But I arrived to find that mysterious “maintenance problems” meant my room was not available. (I noted the presence of a large wedding party in the bar, and drew my own conclusions.) However, they had rebooked me – at the discounted rate – into the Europa Hotel, which was at one point the only top-quality hotel in Belfast and also the most bombed hotel in Europe. It has competition now on the former point (and has long since been overtaken by the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo on the latter) but is still pretty luxurious, so I didn’t complain too much. Much less handy for the reunion, but Belfast is a small city where taxis are inexpensive.

Today I tried a trawl through the bookshops of Belfast, but was very disappointed; lean pickings in Waterstone’s and Forbidden Planet, and most of the second-hand shops have gone; every single one of the cluster of about half a dozen from Harry Hall’s in Smithfield down to the arcade in North Street has closed. I walked over to the charity shops on Botanic Avenue, and then to Book Finders on University Road, but was a bit unimpressed by the range of books available. I’d have thought that the recession might encourage people to offload books onto the second hand market, but I guess the downturn in purchasers’ available resources has a bigger impact.

Except in Book Finders, where I got more than I had bargained for. Sitting outside with a cup of tea, three new books, and a friend, we spotted two other customers running out of the shop – one had stolen the other’s handbag. She had intercepted him just at the pedestrian crossing; I ran over to lend a firm grip to persuade the rather incompetent and demoralised thief to return to the shop while the owner called the police, and I then guarded the front door until they arrived (which they did pretty rapidly, coming from Donegall Pass). They duly arrested him for attempted theft, and took everyone else’s names and addresses for future statements (though I will be surprised if they bother calling me in Belgium; my friend actually had a better view of what happened than I did). We had a good chat with the owners of both the shop and the handbag; not the first theft from there, alas, though the first time I can recall performing a citizen’s arrest (if that is what I did).

Well, home tomorrow, hoping for a quieter journey (and praying that the Curse Of Heathrow will not afflict me this time).

…and President of the National Bank of Poland, and over 80 other people, in plane crash.

(Hat-tip to .)

The Unionist parties have selected a joint candidate for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, who will thus have the backing of the DUP, UUP and Conservatives. This is the first time that there has been a single Unionist candidate in the constituency since 1997.

The lucky candidate, Rodney Connor, used to be Chief Executive of Fermanagh Council. Recruiting public officials to Unionist politics has sometimes ended unhappily in this part of the world. Sitting MP Michelle Gildernew of Sinn Féin is also being challenged by former TV journalist Fearghal McKinney of the SDLP, and by former history teacher Vasundhara Kamble (originally from Mumbai) of the Alliance Party.

The UUP/Conservative alliance was supposed to deliver non-sectarian politics; not a lot of evidence of that in the implementation.

asks if I can identify this story. I can’t, so I turn it over to the collective wisdom of Livejournal:

Genre: Sci-fi, feminist, could be authored by Sheri Tepper although I have read all the synopses I can find of her major works and it doesn’t seem to be there.

Imagine the scene: we are a human-like (possibly human) race on an alien planet, but we’ve been here for ages and lost touch with the technology that brought us here. That’s all a dim legend. We live in cliffs, in tunnels and holes we dig/bore. There are some strange taboos and real dangers: never leave the cliffs/go outside at night, don’t ask questions about girls who go missing.

Cutting to the chase: the plot centres around the revelation of an obscene coming-of-age ceremony for girls, where they are chained down outside the cliffs and left to the mercy of the rather horrible flying/insectoid? aliens.

Any thoughts?

I don’t know Alan Bennett’s work all that well; I think the only other book of his I have read is the previous non-fiction collection, Writing Home, and I’ve seen a very few of his plays – The Madness of King George, The Insurance Man, a student production of Getting On, probably a couple of others; and really really enjoyed The Uncommon Reader. But it doesn’t really matter; these are memoirs of a shy English writer born in Leeds in the mid-1930s and looking back on his life from the years around the turn of the century. Bennett has become something of a national institution, though he would hate to be described as such, and writes here about why he turned down a knighthood in 1996 (“it didn’t suit me”).

The two most effective pieces in the book are the very long opening piece about his mother’s mental illness and the rest of his extended family, particularly her sisters (one of whom died after wandering out of a mental hospital; Bennett himself found her body), and the rather shorter closing piece about his own, so far successful, battle with bowel cancer, a legacy of his father’s side of the family. In between are long, amusing extracts from his diaries between 1996 and 2004, and various other pieces mostly about the arts in Britain and his own work which didn’t appeal to me as much but are, as usual with Bennett, engaging and often bitterly funny. Recommended.

This novel in the New Adventures of Doctor Who series is in fact downloadable from the BBC website here in various formats, with added comments by Mark Gatiss from 2006 (after his TV stories The Unquiet Dead and The Idiot’s Lantern had been broadcast).

The setting is a familiar Whovian one (most recently seen in The Eleventh Hour): rural England, alien menace, the Doctor sorts it out. To be specific, we’re in a Yorkshire village in December 1968; Gatiss packs in a lot of detail, including some memorable characters – the staff of the local radio observatory; the young man who develops a relationship with Ace; the elderly actor who used to play Professor Nightshade on telly (a mixture between Quatermass and the First Doctor). Gatiss says in the notes that he was trying to write a Who book that really belonged more in the horror genre; it works for me.

The next New Adventure in sequence is Paul Cornell’s Love and War, which I read a year and a half ago (and greatly enjoyed); but I shall skip it for now and go on to Ben Aaronovitch’s Transit – I am not a particular fan of Aaronovitch’s writing, but let’s see if this will bring me round.

The UUP leader, Sir Reg Empey, is to stand in South Antrim. (See discussion on Slugger O’Toole here and here.) On the numbers, this is the most winnable DUP seat for the UUP, but there were problems with the originally selected UUP candidate…

East Belfast: DUP 1-4, 4-1 UCUNF
North Belfast: DUP 2-7, SF 5-2
South Belfast: SDLP 5-4, DUP 2-1, UCUNF 5-2
West Belfast: SF 1-500
East Antrim: DUP 1-6, UCUNF 6-1
North Antrim: DUP 2-5, TUV 7-4
South Antrim: DUP 2-5, UCUNF 5-2
North Down: Sylvia Hermon 1-3, UCUNF 2-1
South Down: SDLP 1-5, SDLP 3-1
Fermanagh and South Tyrone: SF 2-7, DUP 11-2, UCUNF also 11-2
Foyle: SDLP 1-5, SF 3-1
Lagan Valley: DUP 1-10, UCUNF 6-1
East Londonderry: DUP 1-6, UCUNF 7-1
Mid Ulster: SF 1-100
Newry and Armagh: SF 1-20, SDLP 8-1
Strangford: DUP 8-11, UCUNF evens
West Tyrone: SF 1-50
Upper Bann: DUP 4-6, UCUNF 2-1, SF 7-1

(Only odds more likely than 10-1 included)

Very few of the bookmakers seem to be offering odds for the NI seats, and only Ladbroke’s so far is doing so for all 18.

Interesting to note that the six fifth-season stories in this run all have six episodes, and in all cases there was certainly scope for some judicious trimming. (I started the fifth season last time with Tomb of the Cybermen, which has four episodes.)

I’ve never been quite sure about The Abominable Snowmen. As so often with this era, we have to form a judgement on the basis of one surviving episode and the many surviving audio tapes. On the one hand, it is an interesting innovation on the base-under-siege storyline to make the base a Tibetan monastery; the location filming is good; the monsters are scary (both the big violent Yeti and the sinister disembodied Intelligence); and Wolfe Morris in particular is great as the ancient Padmasambhava and the evil presence possessing him. But (and I think I’ll be saying this a lot of the six-parters) it is an episode or two too long, and Travers and the monks keep on changing their minds about the Doctor or (in Travers’ case) running off up the mountain mainly to keep the story going.

This story does mark a new and largely positive portrayal of religion in Who. Up to now, we have had squabbling sectarians (The Crusade, The Massacre), deluded cultists (The Aztecs, The Underwater Menace) and religious buildings whose ostensible custodians are using them for another purpose (the Monk in The Time Meddler, the churchwarden in The Smugglers). But these Tibetan monks are sincere, not deluded; and while their leader may have been deceived by the Great Intelligence, their initial encounter was on one of Padmasambhava’s routine trips to the Astral Plane; and the meditation prayer actually works to ward off mind control. I shall start tracking this more systematically, I think.

I really enjoyed The Ice Warriors, though for once I was unable to locate a full recon of episodes 2 and 3 and so combined listening to the Fraser Hines narration with the cut down 17-minute edition of both. Yes, we have another base under siege; but what a base! The uniforms are particularly eye-melting (as Jamie remarks to Victoria at one point), and the interplay between Peter Barkworth’s dysfunctional leader Clent, Peter Sallis’ dissident scientist Elric (!) Penley, and Wendy Gifford’s Miss Garrett with her competing loyalties, is all very watchable. Although Hayles doesn’t overtly tackle the supernatural here, he does have the local humans slavishly worshipping their computer, rather than making their own judgemen.ts. Into this delicate situation blunder first the Ice Warriors and then the Tardis crew. My brother and I once got Bernard Bresslaw’s autograph on the strength of this story, which we hadn’t even seen back in 1982 or whenever it was. He does a great alien menace, establishing them for the next three stories they are in.

There are some unfortunate plot holes – exactly what is the geographical range of the Ioniser, or the story? The base, the spaceship, the Tardis and Penley and Storr’s hideout all seem to be within two minutes’ walk of each other. Jamie’s paralysis, apparently severe, is cured almost without comment, and Victoria is packed off to the Tardis half way through the last episode (presumably to get it right way up) and not seen again. And the Ice Warriors make the mistake also made by so many enemies of the Doctor of imprisoning him somewhere with easy access to their own weaponry. But it is a fun ride.

After a run of bases under siege by alien monsters, The Enemy of the World is a refreshing change of format, though not of setting – as with The Ice Warriors, we are in a not too distant future Earth with a technocratic government and natural disasters. While the previous story drew a lesson from over-reliance on the computer’s leadership, Enemy of the World critiques over-dependence on the judgement of a single human being – even if he happens to look like the Doctor. As so often with a David Whitaker script, there is more going on than meets the eye: consider Salamander as an alternative Doctor (which he actually tries to become in the closing minutes of the story); consider also the symbolism of the underground base, a store of subconscious knowledge and destructive actions.

The guest cast are very watchable – the future Castellan Spandrell as Denes, Colin Douglas as Bruce, and also Mary Peach as Astrid and Carmen Munro as Fariah being particularly strong supporting women characters (the latter getting I think the first decent speaking role for a woman of colour since Zienia Burton in Marco Polo. I also like the breadth of scenery – I don’t believe there is another TV Who story set in Australia, or a Who story in any medium set in Hungary. And we have a helicopter and a hovercraft! Barry Letts thinking big! But Troughton steals the show – it’s a real proof of his acting talents, and while the plot may not always make sense, he is always gripping in both roles. This is the first story to end with a cliffhanger since we saw a claw on the Tardis scanner at the end of The Moonbase.

In a season of base-under-siege stories, The Web of Fear marks the peak. Here the base is a mixed military / scientific outpost in Goodge Street tube station, with everyone operating to their own personal agenda; it becomes apparent early on that one of the team is an enemy agent, but we get a lot of misdirection as to who it is (though of course we fans now know, as the viewers of 1968 could not, that Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart is in the clear). A lot of the drama hinges on information flow and trust – the Doctor’s life is endangered in the first episode because Jamie and Victoria lie about his presence; in turn his plan is thwarted in the last episode because he didn’t tell them clearly enough what he was up to. Unlike the other base-under-siege stories, we don’t get much direct speech from the bad guys until the end of the story; also the base commander, in so far as there is one, isn’t as deranged as in most of the other such stories which makes a nice change.

It’s also rather good to have a returning character – I think Travers is the first to reappear since the Meddling Monk; perhaps we should count the Intelligence as well. (It is not at all clear that any of the various individual Daleks and Cybermen reappear from one story to the next; the evidence is rather against it.) It is a shame that we have lost the extended fight sequence in episode 4. Interesting to hear from Derrick Sherwin on the DVD commentary that he always intended The Web of Fear to be the first UNIT story, a concept he then brought to fruition as writer of The Invasion and producer through to Spearhead from Space (more from Sherwin here).

Fury from the Deep is yet another base-under-siege story; this time commander Robson is more manifestly stupid and obstinate than usual (and that is saying something!) and the means and motivation of the monster particularly poorly explained. Jamie and Victoria asking why they always land in England falls rather flat as the Doctor clearly has no answer. Likewise Victoria’s dissatisfaction with the Tardis lifestyle undermines the show’s premise without being really adequately addressed (though this comes right in the last episode, when she gets the best sendoff of any departing companion since the original three). But it is at least well done – great bubbling seaweed, good special effects visible in the surviving clips, decent music and another helicopter!

Pemberton more or less rewrote the story for the Fourth Doctor (Doctor Who and the Pescatons but it wasn’t much better.

Somewhat to my surprise, I have rather warmed to Victoria after watching her seven stories in order. She is actually rather smart, doing stuff in the Tardis lab in Fury from the Deep while Jamie asks the stupid questions; on the whole she gets into trouble because she has bravely ventured out looking for it; and if she has a bit of a tendency to scream in panic, the Second Doctor also tends to yell in alarm and generally get more ruffled than his other incarnations. But she doesn’t really develop much beyond the occasionally screaming arm candy – even Polly, who is less well educated, manages to work out how to tackle Cybermen and uses her feminine wiles for team advantage; so I can see why Deborah Watling left.

Her one return to the screen, in character, is the decidedly odd Downtime, Marc Platt’s sequel to the two Yeti stories (also including Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane and Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier) which is none the less recommended. Her first audio Companion Chronicle, The Great Glass Elevator, is rather better than her second, which was released last month. In dead tree format, I recommend The Dark Path by David McIntee, though admittedly more for the Master’s appearance than for Victoria; Terrance Dicks’ early novelisation of The Web of FearDowntime..

The final base-under-siege story of this season is The Wheel In Space. I quite liked this on first watching / listening, but in the overall context of Season Five it feels very predictable: we have the obligatory psychotic base commander refusing to deal with the alien menace and wrongly suspecting the Doctor and Jamie. And we have slightly remodelled Cybermen, doing what Cybermen always do. Apart from the predictable plot, the story does have a few things going for it, though. First is that the dynamic among the crew (commander aside) is the most convincing we have had, with two women in senior roles (though less good marks on race – two non-speaking black parts, and a Chinese character played by a Caucasian actor). Second is the introduction of Zoe, who has been trained to be like a Cyberman but wants to do more with her life – she gets more character development here than in the whole of the rest of her time on the show. The effects of the scenes in space are rather well done. And I suspect that the frst episode, with the Doctor and Jamie playing hide-and-seek with the robot on the Silver Carrier, was good watching, now sadly lost. I note also David Whitaker’s trademark obsession with mercury, though this time with added Bernalium, named after J.D., father of Martin.

And who can fail to appreciate the double entendre of Jamie and Zoe’s first conversation, right up there with the First Doctor’s “reacting vibrator”?

We had five stories in a row set on Earth here, the second longest continuous run of such stories in Old Who (exceeded only by the first six Pertwee stories; possibly tied, depnding how you count, by the combination of the last four Seventh Doctor stories and the TV movie). Also five out of six stories were bases-under-siege; funny how rapidly the show became formulaic. (In fairness the next season is much less so.)

We also had here the joint longest run of destroyed episodes – I had thought previously that the gap from The Tenth Planet #4 to The Underwater Menace #2 was the longest, but in fact the sequence from The Web of Fear #2 to The Wheel in Space #2 is also thirteen episodes. Not a single one of these six stories written up in this entry survives in full. I am very glad that there will be far fewer gaps in my next write-up, and none at all after that.

Somewhere in this run I have passed a significant milestone: I have now watched the first 25% of Old Who (including K9 and Company) in order, whether you count by episodes (697 in total, the 175th being The Abominable Snowmen #1) or stories (160, counting Shada and four stories rather than one in Season 23, so the 40th story is The Web of Fear). I haven’t worked out where the first quartile point is in screen minutes, but it is clearly somewhere in between as the relatively small number of episodes longer than 25 minutes are all concentrated towards the end. Anyhow, it is a nice point to mark. (If you flatten out the time period between 23 November 1963 and 6 December 1989, the first quartile point falls two years later, in late May 1970, because of the intense production schedule of the first six seasons.)

< An Unearthly Child – The Aztecs | The Sensorites – The Romans | The Web Planet – Galaxy 4 | Mission To The Unknown – The Gunfighters | The Savages – The Highlanders | The Underwater Menace – Tomb of the Cybermen | The Abominable Snowmen – The Wheel In Space | The Dominators – The Space Pirates | The War Games – Terror of the Autons | The Mind of Evil – The Curse of Peladon | The Sea Devils – Frontier in Space | Planet of the Daleks – The Monster of Peladon | Planet of the Spiders – Revenge of the Cybermen | Terror of the Zygons – The Seeds of Doom | The Masque of Mandragora – The Talons of Weng-Chiang | Horror of Fang Rock – The Invasion of Time | The Ribos Operation – The Armageddon Factor | Destiny of the Daleks – Shada | The Leisure Hive – The Keeper of Traken | Logopolis – The Visitation | Black Orchid – Mawdryn Undead | Terminus – The Awakening | Frontios – Attack of the Cybermen | Vengeance on Varos – In A Fix With Sontarans | The Mysterious Planet – Paradise Towers | Delta and the Bannermen – The Greatest Show in the Galaxy | Battlefield – The TV Movie >

2010 Films 6) One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing

Someone got this for young F at Christmas, one of the 1970s Disney films made in England, set in 1920s London, featuring three nannies versus Chinese spies hunting down a secret message concealed by Lord Southmere on a dinosaur in the Natural History Museum. None of the Chinese speaking parts is actually played by an Asian actor (some of the extras might be); if you can put aside this rather insuperable failure, Peter Ustinov puts on a great show as the lead agent, explicitly linking the shenanigans to anti-colonial struggle; the nannies, played by Helen Hayes and Joan Sims, get rather less satisfactory parts though they and their cohorts do manage rather improbably to defeat twice their number of martial arts students. Derek Nimmo, aged 45, plays Lord Southmere, who is aged 31. The humour is basically slapstick with a dinosaur skeleton running round London and Windsor – Jon Pertwee, recently ex-Doctor Who, turns up as a deranged colonel determined to bag it for his wall, and various other luminaries of British comedy make appearances. The two rich young white boys under Helen Hayes’ care work out what is going on before anyone else does, and give the secret to Peter Ustinov (or rather give it back since Derek Nimmo stole it from the Chinese in the first place). Not a film that could be made by any director with the remotest sensitivity to race and gender issues today.

April Books 3) One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing, by John Harvey from the script by Bill Walsh

I had read the novelisation as a child, and it was interesting to go back to it as an adult, particularly having read the Doctor Who novelisations comparatively recently. It actually manages to be more racist than the film, which is saying something: by making Derek Nimmo’s character, Lord Southmere, the narrator, the Chinese are quite comprehensively othered. There are some odd changes between film and book, perhaps reflecting different stages in the script development: the personal connection between Peter Ustinov’s character, Hnup Wan, and the mother of Marshal Wu Tsai, so crucial to the denoument of the story, is absent; on the other hand the character of Grubb, the police detective played by Roy Kinnear, is given much more development. As novelisations go, it’s not a bad example of converting script to page, and is illustrated with some rather lovely line drawings (but the artist is not credited).

April Books 4) The Great Dinosaur Robbery, by ‘David Forrest’ (Robert Forrest-Webb and David Eliades)

The original book on which the Disney film was based is set in New York, not London, in the contemporary early 1970s, so the Chinese are Maoists rather than followers of a warlord. Also the dinosaur gets dismantled by the nannies overnight rather than driven off on the back of the truck; and, most crucially setting the tone for the book, in the opening scene the Earl of Hastings is killed by his own cyanide capsule when his ex-nanny belts him across the face, rather than being held captive for most of the story like Lord Southmere in the film. The book concentrates much more on the work of the police investigators of the dinosaur theft, a special team of stereotypes brought together to fight international organised crime. One of the nannies is shagging her employer, while another is allergic to men; this is supposed to be funny, as are the freqent citations of Mao by the Chinese and their eventual fate (sent to Taiwan, where they will probably be executed). One or two jokes from the book made it into the film, but really this is for grownups who aren’t looking for anything very worthwhile.

Thanks to Abigail Nussbaum for supplying links for those nominees available online; I’ve combined that with the latest prices from The Book Depository to generate this list. (And yes, those are euro prices, because this list is largely for my convenience: currently €1 = US$1.35, so add about a third; €1 = £0.89, so take off ten per cent; other currencies here.)

Best Novel

• Boneshaker, Cherie Priest: €12.09
• The City & The City, China Miéville: €7.49
• Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles Wilson: €17.34 hardback, but €7.59 paperback coming next month
• Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente: €9.17
• Wake, Robert J. Sawyer: just say no €6.75 paperback to be published on Thursday
• The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi – €16.98 hardback, but €9.28 paperback to be published next month.

Best Novella

• "Act One", Nancy Kress – here
• The God Engines, John Scalzi – €13.61
• “Palimpsest”, Charles Stross in Wireless – €9.84 – and here
• Shambling Towards Hiroshima, James Morrow – €10.14
• “Vishnu at the Cat Circus”, Ian McDonald in Cyberabad Days – €7.65
• The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, Kage Baker – not available at The Book Depository; RRP €25.94

Best Novelette

• “Eros, Philia, Agape”, Rachel Swirsky – here
• The Island”, Peter Watts – hereThe New Space Opera 2, hardback €11.44, paperback for €5.93 out next month
• “It Takes Two”, Nicola Griffith – in Eclipse Three, €10.46 and here.
• “One of Our Bastards is Missing”, Paul Cornell – here and in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three, €5.43
• “Overtime”, Charles Stross – here
• “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast”, Eugie Foster – here

Best Short Story

• “The Bride of Frankenstein”, Mike Resnick – just say no not yet available online
• “Bridesicle”, Will McIntosh – here
• “The Moment”, Lawrence M. Schoen – here and in Footprints, €10.09
• “Non-Zero Probabilities”, N.K. Jemisin – here
• “Spar”, Kij Johnson – here

Best Related Book

• Canary Fever: Reviews, John Clute – not available at The Book Depository; RRP€39.43
• Hope-In-The-Mist: The Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees, Michael Swanwick – not available at The Book Depository
• The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction, Farah Mendlesohn – €38.01
• On Joanna Russ, Farah Mendlesohn (ed.) – €20.38
• The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of SF Feminisms, Helen Merrick – €12.98
• This is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is “I”), Jack Vance – not available at The Book Depository; RRP €29.64

Best Graphic Story

• Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? written by Neil Gaiman; art by Andy Kubert and Scott Williams – €14.73
• Captain Britain And MI13. Volume 3: Vampire State written by Paul Cornell; art by Leonard Kirk, Mike Collins, Adrian Alphona and Ardian Syaf – €11.15
• Fables Vol 12: The Dark Ages written by Bill Willingham; art by Mark Buckingham, Peter Gross, Andrew Pepoy, Michael Allred, David Hahn, Lee Loughridge, Laura Allred and by Todd Klein – €11.51
• Girl Genius, Volume 9: Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm written by Kaja and Phil Foglio, art by Phil Foglio and Cheyenne Wright – start reading here
• Schlock Mercenary: The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse written and illustrated by Howard Tayler – start reading here

Eleven of the seventeen short fiction nominees are already available for free online, but note how inexpensive the anthologies are; and how expensive and in several cases difficult to obtain the non-fiction books are. (I have whined about Beccon’s customer-unfriendly policies before.)

• Behind the Sofa – The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog: The Girl in the Spotty Nightgown and Red Cardigan
  The best Who blog assesses the latest incarnation
  (tags: doctorwho)
• drasecretcampus: Banoffee Pie
  Serves 2 to 12.
  (tags: cooking)

I love Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga, but this is not one of my favourite volumes, and I was slightly surprised to discover that it had won the Hugo. Structurally it is rather obviously bolted together from the original novella, “The Weatherman”, and the subsequent expansion to novel length with the whole space war story; and the whole plot crucially depends on the massive coincidence of Miles bumping into Gregor on page 145. Having said that, the competition that year was not especially intense (see below) and I wonder if there might not have been an element of rewarding Bujold not just for The Vor Game but for her work to date, and particularly for the Dendarii stories.

It is still a decent enough book. Bujold’s portrayal of a rule-bound society which is trying to adapt to the outside world, and which is run by actual human beings who occasionally just want to run away from it all, is what really makes the series (and gives The Vor Game its title) – my favourite character in this book is Gregor, worried that he may not be up to the job but proving himself both sexually and politically. Miles could have been one of these intensely annoying MilSF heroes who never lose a battle or an argument; but we do see him make mistakes and paying for the consequences. The complex military and diplomatic situation of the Hegen Hub is conveyed to us sufficiently clearly that we appreciate the potential impact of the decisions made by just one or two outsiders. So it’s a fun read, but I think she didn’t really hit her stride until Memory, Komarr and A Civil Campaign.

Other Hugo nominees that year: Earth by David Brin, The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons, Queen of Angels by Greg Bear and The Quiet Pools by Michael Kube-McDowell. The only other one I have read is the Simmons, which was a disappointment after Hyperion